is it getting late?" For the whist-players at the end of the library had pushed back their chairs, and men were strolling back from the billiard-room.
"Don't you suppose Lady Kitty suspects a good deal?" said Ashe.
"I dare say. Brought up in Paris, you see," said the white-haired Englishman, with a shrug. "Of course she knows everything she shouldn't."
"Brought up in a convent, please," said Ashe, smiling. "And I thought the French girl was the most innocent and ignorant thing alive."
Lord Grosville received the remark with derision.
"You ask my wife what she thinks about French convents. She knows. She'll tell you tales!"
Ashe thought, however, that he could trust himself to see that she did nothing of the sort.
The smoking-room broke up late, but the new Under-Secretary sat up still later, reading and smoking in his bedroom. A box of Foreign Office papers lay on his table. He went through them with a keen sense of pleasure, enjoying his new work and his own competence to do it, of which, notwithstanding his remarks to Mary Lyster, he was not really at all in doubt. Then when his comments were done, and the papers replaced in the order in which they would now go up to the Secretary of State, he felt the spring night oppressively mild, and walking to the window, he threw it wide open.
He looked out upon a Dutch garden, full of spring flowers in bloom. In the midst was a small fountain, which murmured to itself through the night. An orangery or conservatory, of a charming eighteenth-century design, ran round the garden in a semicircle, its flat pilasters and mouldings of yellow stone taking under the moonlight the color and the delicacy of ivory. Beyond the terrace which bordered the garden, the ground fell to a river, of which the reaches, now dazzling, now sombre, now slipping secret under woods, and now silverly open to the gentle slopes of the park, brought wildness and romance into a scene that had else been tame. Beyond the river on a rising ground was a village church with a spire. The formal garden, the Georgian conservatory, the park, the river, the church—they breathed England, and the traditional English life. All that they implied, of custom and inheritance, of strength and narrowness, of cramping prejudice and stubborn force, was very familiar to Ashe, and on the whole very congenial. He was glad to be an Englishman, and a member of an English government. The ironic mood which was tolerably constant in him did not in the least interfere with his normal enjoyment of normal goods. He saw himself often as a shade among shadows, as an actor among actors; but the play was good, all the same. That a man should know himself to be a fool was in his eyes, as it was in Lord Melbourne's, the first of necessities. But fool or no fool, let him find the occupations that suited him and pursue them. On those terms life was still amply worth living, and ginger was still hot in the mouth.
This was his usual philosophy. Religiously he was a sceptic, enormously interested in religion. Should he ever become Prime Minister, as Lady Tranmore prophesied, he would know much more theology than the bishops he might be called on to appoint. Politically, at the same time, he was an aristocrat, enormously interested in liberty. The absurdities of his own class were still more plain to him, perhaps, than the absurdities of the populace. But had he lived a couple of generations earlier he would have gone with passion for Catholic Emancipation, and boggled at the Reform Bill. And if Fate had thrown him on earlier days still, he would not, like Falkland, have died ingeminating peace; he would have fought; but on which side, no friend of his could have been quite sure. To have the reputation of an idler, and to be in truth a plodding and unwearied student,—this, at any rate, pleased him. To avow an enthusiasm, or an affection, generally seemed to him an indelicacy; only two or three people in the world knew what was the real quality of his heart. Yet no man feigns shirking without in some measure learning to shirk; and there were certain true indolences and Sybaritisms in Ashe of which he was fully and contemptuously aware, without either wishing or feeling himself able to break the yoke of them.
